#746 Nominalism or Anti-Realism?

Dr. craig’s response

Dr. Hollingsworth, who is helping us to develop the curriculum and courses for our proposed Academic Center, is quite right in issuing this correction. As I explain in my God Over All (2016), in the philosophical literature both anti-Platonism and anti-realism have been called “nominalism.”  Since anti-Platonism and anti-realism are two different views, this label is very confusing. Anti-Platonists deny that there are abstract objects. But some anti-Platonists are realists about mathematical entities and other purportedly abstract objects, taking them to be in fact concrete objects, such as thoughts of God, rather than abstract. By contrast, anti-realists about mathematical entities and other abstracta deny that such entities exist at all, whether abstractly or concretely. So to say that someone is a nominalist when it comes to, say, numbers doesn’t tell us what he believes.

Moreover, “nominalism” is a term which is used in two different philosophical debates to denominate very different views. The first is the age-old dispute over the existence of universals.  In this debate, nominalism is the view that universals do not exist, that everything that exists is a particular.  The second debate is a very recent discussion, centered in the philosophy of mathematics, that has arisen only since the publication of the German mathematician Gottlob Frege’s Foundations of Arithmetic (1884).  In this debate the word “nominalism” is often used as a synonym for anti-Platonism about abstract objects. The problem is that a person who is a nominalist in one debate may not be a nominalist in the other debate!  For example, in the old dispute over universals one type of nominalism is called class nominalism, according to which similar objects are those included in a certain class.  Since classes are abstract objects akin to sets, however, such a thinker is not a nominalist in the second debate, but rather a Platonist!  Similarly, a person who identifies universals as thoughts in someone’s mind is a nominalist in the second debate (since thoughts are concrete, not abstract, objects), but not a nominalist in the first debate (since he takes thoughts to be real and therefore universals to be real).  The tendency of some philosophers to blur the lines of these two debates by use of the word “nominalism” has therefore been a source of confusion.

Finally, in a theological context “nominalism” has been used as a label for a particular view of predication about God which has very negative theological implications. While vaguely aware of this when writing God Over All, I have since encountered it more fully in working on my systematic philosophical theology. The question at issue here is whether the predications we make of God, such as “God is good” or “God is all-powerful,” have any factual content. I think that such predications are univocally true. Such predicates when ascribed to God have the same meaning they do in ordinary discourse, and the resulting predications are true. God really is good and all-powerful. But as an anti-realist who denies that abstract objects like properties exist, I don’t think that the reason God is good and all-powerful is because He stands in some exemplification relation to an abstract object goodness or all-powerfulness. I even affirm that God is necessarily or essentially good and all-powerful without implying that there is some abstract object called the divine essence which God instantiates.

By contrast certain medieval nominalists held that such predicates are mere words and that the resulting predications are just strings of words without propositional content, that is to say, they don’t assert anything or state a fact about God at all. Although we say things like “God is good” or “God is all-powerful” nothing in reality corresponds to such predications. Such a view leaves us with complete agnosticism about God, since none of the predications we make of Him actually describes Him. We are left with nothing more than mysticism. Such a view is theologically anathema, for it denies the truths about God that are central to Christianity, such as “God so loved the world that He gave. . . .” (John 3.16). To call my anti-realism “nominalism” is therefore not just misleading but slanderous.